


flames singing to the ashes

by jdphoenix



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Past Kara Lynn Palamas/Grant Ward - Freeform, Past Will Daniels/Jemma Simmons - Freeform, Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-08
Updated: 2018-11-08
Packaged: 2019-08-20 16:58:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16559669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jdphoenix/pseuds/jdphoenix
Summary: Malick wants SHIELD to find him.





	flames singing to the ashes

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Lousa Wendorff's "stop this fire."

When the upstart trails his men to the remote base and threatens to upend all his plans, Gideon is understanding. He invites him in, treats him as an equal. It’s what the boy wants, what he’s spent months playing at with his crudely spray-painted skulls-and-tentacles and his raiding of abandoned vaults. And after all of this, Ward still looks at it all with barely contained derision.

“Not to complain,” he says, swirling the scotch in his glass, “but I don’t really get why I’m here.”

Gideon spreads his hands wide. “You followed my men after you discovered they’d performed an operation in what you consider to be ‘your territory.’”

“I consider the _world_ to be my territory.” And isn’t that just like the young? So greedy, so demanding. Not enough they’re brought into this beautiful world, oh no, they need to _own_ it. No perspective.

“And isn’t this where you wanted to be?” Gideon asks genially. “In the heart of Hydra?”

“I was already in the heart of Hydra.”

Gideon barely contains a scoff. As if that hollowed out old warehouse could ever be the heart of such a vaunted organization.

Ward casts a look at the hastily constructed metal and plastic enclosing them. Gideon admits the base isn’t much, but then it isn’t meant to be. This is a temporary headquarters. Their work here will be done in less than twenty-four hours and then they can turn to their true purpose.

“This isn’t exactly permanent,” Ward says, seeing the obvious, “so what’s the point of it?”

“Tradition,” Gideon says, passion warming his words. “That castle out there used to be the center of Hydra’s universe. And,” he admits, “SHIELD already knows about it.”

“You want them to find you.”

Gideon refrains from pointing out that SHIELD found Ward easily enough just a few weeks past. Letting the boy know how closely he’s been watched is a sure way to get his back up and that isn’t what Gideon wants at all.

“Did you think we were hiding? No, no. We need them, I’m afraid.” He eases back in his chair, taking a slow drink from his glass. “I suppose there’s something poetic in that—SHIELD once again facilitating Hydra’s greatest triumphs, totally unawares.”

He nods to the side of the room. Ward has no doubt noticed the table there as it’s guarded by two heavily outfitted men, but he cannot possibly grasp the importance of what lies there. Five boxes, each containing one of the last five pieces of the monolith. The rest were destroyed in experiments over the centuries, failed attempts to bring the God home. And of course the monolith itself was lost—first to SHIELD and then, more permanently, to their efforts to recover their lost agent.

But that was for the best. Soon their breakthrough will be Hydra’s, as all of their best always were.

Gideon explains this to Ward. Explains to him the monolith and the God—and their place in his new order.

“Hydra has served him for centuries—not men like Red Skull and Whitehall, they were heretics using our name for their own ends. And we, in turn, used them. For this. For _him_. Thanks to SHIELD, he can finally return to take this world. _His_ territory. And it will be Hydra—those true believers, me, _you—_ who will rule beneath him. That has always been our true goal.”

As is expected, Ward is incredulous. But he is also considering. “You think I’m a true believer?” he asks. Gideon notes he doesn’t deny it. “I only found out about this God five minutes ago.”

This will be difficult. A man like Ward will not like to know he has been carefully watched and cultivated by his betters. But there are some facts which Gideon can admit to knowing and they will be the most important.

“Your soulmate,” he begins, his tone gentle—and a good thing too because it takes a great deal to cause a man of Ward’s skills to flinch. “She was brainwashed by Whitehall. When he was unavailable, you tortured Bakshi in his stead. And yet you came back to Hydra, after she passed.”

The poor boy grips his glass so tight it’s a wonder it doesn’t shatter in his hand. “Your point?”

“Didn’t you ever wonder why? Why would you return to the organization that tore her mind apart?”

He can see on his face that the answer is yes, he has wondered. After some struggle, he manages to form an answer. “Hydra made Kara. What she went through, it’s what bonded us.”

Yes, Gideon knows that too. Agent 33 bore no soulmark the day Whitehall’s mercenaries captured her, but by the time she was ready to join his ranks, she had Ward’s name written beneath her arm. It says something about the number Garrett did on the boy.

“Hydra brought you to your destiny.”

Slowly, Ward nods. It has always been Hydra, in every phase of his life, which has given him purpose.

Gideon leans in to grant greater weight to his words. “I think it has again.”

He sits back, allowing that to sink in. Ward is young, independent. It will take him time to accept his place in all of this, but for now Gideon only needs him to accept _this_. The rest can fall into place later.

Uncomfortable with these new revelations, Ward shifts in his seat and brings the conversation back around to matters he’s more familiar with. “You said you wanted SHIELD to find you. You think they’re just gonna show because you put up a few tents?”

Oh, he was hoping it would be this good. Ward truly has no idea what those men were doing so near his base today.

It was only chance that brought them so close—Gideon thought for a time it wasn’t, but if SHIELD had been conducting their own business in the area, surely they would have set upon them by now. But it’s all to the good. It’s destiny, as he said.

He sets his drink aside, on the edge of a console just within reach, and taps a button to bring up the security feed from a nearby room. The angle is poor, as is the quality, but recognition sparks in Ward’s eyes. Unsurprising, given the vitriol with which he’s set about hunting down his former teammates in recent months.

“She was in a park,” Gideon says, “enjoying the scenery, I’d imagine.” After so long on an alien world, who wouldn’t? “Coulson’s engineer, Leopold Fitz, nearly killed himself trying to find her when she was lost through the portal. I don’t doubt he’ll come for her again.”

“You want Fitz?” There’s some disbelief in Ward’s tone. Gideon doesn’t know why there should be. Fitz was, prior to a certain unfortunate event, one of SHIELD’s brightest minds and on a team with Ward himself to boot. But, again, it’s best not to let on he knows too much.

“Ah, that’s right. You know them.”

“Fitz and Simmons are a team,” Ward says pointedly. “If he studied the portal-”

Gideon knows where this is going and, as there’s no reason to hide he knows more about SHIELD than he ought, says, “They _were_ a team. My mole within SHIELD reports they haven’t been close for well over a year, ever since _someone_ caused him minor brain damage.”

“Still,” Ward grouses. “She’s one of the smartest people on the _planet_. And if she’s been through the portal…” He looks to the screen. Gideon notes the faint hint of fondness in his gaze. That can be useful. “She should be good for a helluva lot more than _bait_.”

“She _should_ , yes. But I’m afraid she’s made a nuisance of herself, refusing to cooperate at every turn. And, seeing as Fitz is the one we _know_ has the information we need, I don’t see any reason to start torturing it out of her until he’s on site to witness it.”

Ward shrugs, apparently not so fond of Simmons as to be bothered by the idea of her imminent torture. “Seems like a waste of time.”

Gideon decides to throw the boy a bone. It won’t deter his ultimate plans—and it might, if Ward’s able to pull it off, get him there that much sooner. “If you think you can get her to talk—with _out_ harming her—you’re welcome to try.”

Ward grins, suddenly feral, and there is no doubt he was brought in by John Garrett. “Thought you’d never ask.”

 

+++++

 

Jemma expects more questions about the monolith, Maveth, _It_. So she doesn’t bother to stand when the tent flap opens, only glances up—and it’s only Malick, come back again with-

It’s not a guard.

She stands, heart in her throat as Ward steps around Malick. Her mind whirls. She knew of course that Ward was running his own resurrected branch of Hydra, gathering together agents who were cast into the wind when the heads they served were decapitated in the wake of Trip’s death. But she didn’t think he had anything to do with Malick and his religious nonsense.

“So Malick’s been telling me about your space adventures,” he says. His stance is carefully at ease as though they’re only two old friends having a chat.

“Has he?” she asks, her voice thinner than she’d like. Perhaps she should have kept quiet, that might have been best.

Ward doesn’t seem bothered by her response. He casually comes alongside her, looking her up and down as if he can’t guess why her hands have remained behind her back this entire time.

“Not _much_ ,” he admits. “He says you haven’t been very talkative. That’s not like you.” He puts one hand on the post holding her in place, high above her head so he can lean into her space while he pouts.

She turns her head to meet his eyes steadily. “You don’t know me anymore.”

 _That_ bothers him. Enough he remains silent for several beats.

“I told you,” Malick says. “She hasn’t been at all forthcoming.”

Ward pushes off the post. “Well, then she’s got a _reason_. Simmons loves sharing new scientific discoveries. So tell us, princess, why don’t you want to talk about that other world you got to explore?”

A laugh bursts out of her. It hurts. One of the men who grabbed her caught her with a blow to the chest and her ribs having been aching dully ever since.

“I wasn’t on a nature walk,” she says once she can speak without wheezing. “It was a struggle every day just to survive.”

“No big, bad god there to provide?” Ward’s question is for her, but his eyes are on Malick.

“I didn’t see any _gods_ , but there was-”

Malick’s eyes light up. “Yes?”

She cringes back from the hunger in his expression and Ward is quick to get between them. “What was out there, princess?” he asks softly.

She hesitates, but decides that as they already know there’s _something_ out there, there’s no harm in telling them exactly what it is Hydra’s so keen on bringing back.

“It’s a monster,” she says. Ward’s lips turn up in a smile. “It wiped out nearly all life on that world and ravaged the surface at the slightest provocation. We had to live underground just to survive.”

“We?” Malick echoes.

Jemma straightens her spine. She’s known Malick’s name for months. It was featured prominently in the project Distant Star files. When she dug them up, she thought those named in them were unlucky, men and women who only wanted to push out and discover the way humans have always done, but unintentionally doomed four men to death. Now she knows better.

“Will Daniels,” she says, the name an accusation. “My soulmate.”

Ward steps aside, allowing the full weight of her words to fall on Malick.

“He survived?” Malick asks, more curious than shamed.

“Yes,” Jemma says, a fierce sort of pride filling her aching chest. “He did. No thanks to you. And that- that _thing_ murdered him when he was mere yards from reaching home.” She can feel Ward behind her, preventing her from seeing how he might react to her story. “My soulmate is dead, Mr. Malick, and it will make me supremely happy to know that creature will die alone on that barren world just like he did.”

Far from being injured as she’d wished, Malick only seems disappointed. There’s a lordly sort of pity in his eyes when he says, “You’re young. You have time to bond again.”

She flinches and Ward catches her, one arm around the pole to her shoulder while he holds the other to his chest. His breath falls over her cheek. If she were to lean just slightly to the right, her head would rest against his.

“As you can see,” Malick says, “she’s beyond reasoning with.”

“I don’t know about that.” Ward squeezes her warmly before pulling away. His hand travels down her arm, stopping only briefly at her wrist where the zip-tie is digging into her skin. “You just gotta know how to connect with her.”

One of his fingers slides over her wrist, making room between her flesh and the hard plastic, letting her know that he’s seen what’s there. Long, looping letters circling her entire wrist, almost like a bracelet. There’s an elegance to them, a carefully crafted veneer of respectability that’s nothing at all like the clumsy scrawl fading away beneath her collarbone.

What Malick said was true. It’s not uncommon at all for someone who loses a soulmate early in life to, later, find a match with someone else, someone they’ve developed a close relationship with—unlike initial bonds, which strike strangers as often as friends—and that only after decades have passed and the individual has been sufficiently changed by the course of their long life to warrant a new bonding.

Ward’s name appeared on Jemma’s wrist four days after Will’s death.

“If you want to keep at it…,” Malick says.

“No.” Ward gives her arm one last squeeze as he moves completely away. It’s a struggle not to sway after him. Her body is as hungry for his warmth as her soul is for his presence. “We’ll wait for Fitz. Then the real fun can begin.”

 

+++++

 

Grant steps out of the castle and into chaos. After the deathly silence of a room full of dead bodies, it’s like hitting a brick wall of sound. Suffice it to say, Coulson’s not going along with Malick’s plans. Grant could’ve told the old fart it wouldn’t be that easy if he’d bothered to ask—he also could’ve not used Jemma’s phone to call Coulson and warn him it was a trap, but what’re you gonna do.

Coulson’s knockoff Avengers are tearing through the pop-up base—literally, one of those newbies is melting the metal bracings holding up the walls as he goes, leaving most of Malick’s forces trapped beneath sheets of plastic and easy pickings for the rest of Coulson’s people.

“Get going,” Grant orders. SHIELD’s got a main objective here, same as Grant does, but it won’t take them long to turn their attention to the castle once those tents go down. He wants his people well out of here before then.

And that main objective is just now being dragged out the south side with Malick’s entourage. Blind fury grips him when she stumbles and one of the guards pushes her to keep her moving.

A distant yell grabs his attention before he can follow. He picks out Morse and Hunter among Coulson’s forces. They’re here. Together. He could separate them from the herd, load them into a van and be gone before SHIELD even realized they were missing.

“Let’s go,” Grant says to what remains of his STRIKE team. They head south.

No reasoning, no weighing the pros and cons. Fuck Morse and Hunter. He came here for Jemma and he’s not leaving without her.

He gestures for his people to fan out once they hit the trees. In a heartbeat they disappear, blending into the foliage. It goes quiet again, the trees absorbing most of the noise from the firefight happening behind them. Grant doesn’t bother to keep quiet—he doesn’t need to. Malick’s guards are on edge when he emerges on the edge of a dirt road, but they lower their weapons when they see his face. They trust him because Malick trusts him.

And Malick’s opening his arms, still with that fatherly grin like he and Grant are anything but enemies. “I was wondering if you’d make it. Looks like your reputation-”

Grant never hears what his reputation is. He lifts his gun, trusts his people to be where he wants them—and they are.

Malick’s guards go down fast. Malick not so much.

A bullet to the gut. The kind of wound that’s slow, painful. And out here in the trees, away from the castle and the fighting, it’ll be ages before SHIELD finds him. That magic window to save his life will shut before he sees the first stylized eagle.

But he still might live long enough to talk and Grant can’t have that. He steals a trick from May, breaks the asshole’s larynx before he hits the ground, and leaves him behind to climb in the van.

Kebo’s up front in the driver’s seat and Hicks climbs in next to him a second after Grant pulls his door shut.

“Tell the others to keep up,” Grant says—they won’t have any trouble finding their own rides in the mess SHIELD’s making out there—and turns his attention to the most important person here.

Jemma’s next to the far door, angled awkwardly thanks to her bound hands. And that’s the first order of business, he decides.

“Come here,” he says, motioning her nearer with one hand while the other pulls a knife from his boot. Once she sees it, she twists around, giving him her hands without any hesitation.

He likes that. Trust. Didn’t think he’d get too much of that from her.

She doesn’t run either when he slips closer, positioning his arm to wrap over her shoulders when she sinks back into the seat. Her muscles are limp after so long held back like that so it could just be she’s too tired to bother fighting a pointless battle—that doesn’t seem like her style though.

“Hi,” he says when she looks at him.

“Hi.”

She’s really not gonna give him anything, is she? He can respect that though and feels himself smiling despite his annoyance.

He slips the knife back into place in his boot and then reaches across her to take her hand. Her wrist’s red and swollen and there’s not enough light with just the moon to make out the words, but that’s his name there.

“You tried to kill me,” he reminds her. It seems relevant, given what they are now.

She doesn’t react, only keeps on with those long, measured breaths. “I was a different person then.”

Before the planet, before Malick’s god, before Will Daniels. Any or all of them could’ve changed her—all of them probably did—but he’s thinking, based on personal experience, there’s one in particular that could’ve done it alone.

“So was I.” He was trying to be better for Kara and look where that got him.

He wonders, briefly, if he hadn’t found Jemma’s name on his skin all those weeks ago, would he have been swayed by Malick’s talk of destiny? There’s no way of knowing, but he’s glad he didn’t have to find out.

“Maybe I’m not so different.” He looks around to draw her attention to where they are—the van, his men, the dark road with SHIELD lagging far behind. “I am kidnapping you.”

“You’re not.” It’s the most emotion he’s heard in her voice since she talked about getting revenge.

She twists—not all the way, just enough to get a good look at him—and her hand lands on his chest like that’s gonna help what she says sink in. He wonders if she can feel his heart skip a beat. He wonders if he really cares if she knows.

“That’s why I was out in the open. Hunter had reported a gym nearby as a possible recruiting location and I thought one of your people might see me and know who I was.” Her voice gets smaller as she goes and her face drops. “It was probably silly.”

“No.” He catches her chin, making her look at him. “You were right, my people were nearby. If any of them had seen you before Malick’s men got to you, they would’ve brought you straight to me.”

He can feel her pulse pounding. Ten beats before she asks, “Why?”

He smiles, reaches out again to take her hand. He brings it up to kiss her wrist and the words that mark her as his. “Because you’re my soulmate. Because I want you with me.”

“Not because you want revenge on Bobbi?”

This is gonna be a problem, he can just feel it. But then no relationship is perfect.

He relaxes in his seat, keeping his grip on her hand in his lap. “I’m not gonna pretend it won’t be fun letting the team know I’ve got you. Or that I don’t still want revenge for Kara. But I do want you more.”

When he’s thought about it before—the inevitable struggle between Jemma’s loyalty to the team and her bond to him—he thought it would be hard. Like a betrayal of Kara’s memory. But tonight proved it’s not. He didn’t even hesitate over the question of Jemma or Morse and he knows in his heart Kara would have agreed with his decision.

And thinking of revenge…

“Hicks?” Grant calls. “Any word from Markham?”

Hicks meets his eyes in the rearview. “Last check-in he’d made it safely out with no one the wiser.”

“Good.” Grant smiles at Jemma and gives her hand a faint squeeze. “The last pieces of the monolith, the ones Malick was planning to use to bring his ‘god’ back to Earth. I know we don’t have Skye, but I’m sure my people can come up with something comparable to destroy them.”

Her fingers go slack in his and for a second her expression is unreadable. Then there are tears in her eyes and she’s sitting back, closer to him than before. “Thank you,” she says thickly.

He leans close, dropping his forehead briefly against her head to say, “No thanks necessary, princess.”

He sits up again, thinking that’ll be it for a while. She’s had a big day and she was right earlier, he doesn’t know her anymore; she’s not the talkative woman he knew on the Bus.

But she surprises him a mile later by speaking into the quiet. “Where is it? Your mark?”

He angles himself a little away so he can point. “Here.” On his bicep like a tattoo, all it needs is a heart wrapped around her name.

She looks at his arm for a moment, then to her wrist—both marks are on the left, that’s supposed to be a good sign when they’re so close; not that it worked out too well for him and Kara—then settles against him again, this time resting her head against his shoulder.

He waits a minute to be sure she’s really comfortable, then kisses her hair. There’ll be hell to pay for today—Coulson’ll be pissed and there’s no chance Malick didn’t have friends—but for now he lets himself just wallow in the simple joy he never thought he’d feel again: having his soulmate secure at his side.

 


End file.
